Recall of the Wild

We are wreaking havoc on the planet. Scientists predict that half of all living species will be obliterated by the end of the century, and in this age of man-made destruction it seems obvious we should try to salvage some of what’s left. But as Jon Mooallem discovers in his ambitious and fascinating first book, “Wild Ones,” American conservation today presents a far greater conundrum than deciding what to save or even how to save it. Such efforts force us to reconsider our relationship with other species and to confront what may be our obsolete fantasy of “wilderness.” Most of all, they force us to rethink the human animal.

Mooallem, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, seamlessly blends reportage from the front lines of wildlife conservation with a lively cultural history of animals in America, telling stories of people past and present whose concern for animals makes them act in ways that are sometimes unexpected, sometimes heroic, and occasionally absurd. Thomas Jefferson obsesses over finding an American mammoth; a “sharp-witted hippie” ignites a worldwide movement to save the whales; a man lives in a cage and learns to dance with a whooping crane. There is very little self-righteousness or sentimentalism here, just an intense desire to understand why we do what we do when it comes to wild animals in America. Mooallem, who observes conservationists at work from California to Manitoba, narrates his experience while questioning his own assumptions along the way.

The book concentrates on three endangered species — the polar bear (doomed media darling), Lange’s metalmark butterfly (obscure beauty), and the whooping crane (conservation success story with major caveats). Mooallem watches hungry polar bears waiting for ice to form so that they can hunt. He counts butterflies in a fragile riverbank ecosystem, “a narrow band of land at the anonymous, industrialized fringes of town, the kind of place not easily reached by any bus line, but around the corner from where a transit company parks its buses at night.” He follows an improbable annual migration of captive-born whooping cranes led by men flying ultralight planes, each one dressed in what Mooallem describes as “a long, frumpy gown and white hooded helmet with mesh covering the face.” The costume looks like “a beekeeping suit crossed with a Ku Klux Klan get-up.”

But this isn’t “Wild America.” There are no lingering close-ups or hushed moments of thrilling intimacy with wild animals. Which is part of the point. The art critic John Berger has argued that looking at animals gives us access to an unvarnished truth, whereas Mooallem suggests that looking at animals is hardly an act of pure observation. “From the very beginning, America’s wild animals have inhabited the terrain of our imagination just as much as they’ve inhabited the actual land.” He calls them “free-roaming Rorschachs” and points to the instability of the stories we weave around them to underscore their fiction. Pigeons were once considered lovely but are now seen as a filthy nuisance. Bears were once regarded as monsters, but when Theodore Roose­velt refused to shoot a wounded bear tied up for his sporting pleasure, the country seized on this moment of mercy and the beloved teddy bear was born. Children are surrounded by imaginary animals — butterflies on pajamas, animal-themed classrooms, books and movies full of fish and foxes that behave like people. As Mooallem digs through the layers of meaning that have “been draped over animals, and on top of each other like translucent silk scarves,” one starts to get the feeling that maybe we have never been able to really see wild animals at all.

“Wild Ones” delves into science as well as history, and two particularly illuminating — and destabilizing — scientific concepts serve as touchstones. The first is known as “shifting baselines syndrome.” Each generation gauges its expectations of the natural world against what they observe, which is the world they inherited from their parents, which is already different from the world their parents inherited. As Mooallem explains it, overfishing may deplete fish stocks, but the next generation doesn’t “see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes their baseline, against which they’ll measure any subsequent losses in their lifetimes.” Our own limited experience is a poor guide to the true scale of devastation that surrounds us, and “a comprehensive picture of the changes happening across generations never truly comes into focus.” Given all of this, it’s unclear what conservationists should try to protect — how many fish should there be in the sea?

This leads to “conservation reliance,” in which species come to rely on conservation efforts for their survival. “Just as we’re now causing the vast majority of extinctions,” Mooallem writes, “the vast majority of endangered species will survive only if we keep actively rigging the world around them in their favor.” Lange’s metalmark butterflies will lay their eggs only on a certain type of buckwheat — also endangered — that grows on the tiny patch of riverfront by the bus depot whose dunes have been depleted by mining; in other words, the butterfly will disappear completely unless conservationists vigilantly pull weeds and shift sand and try to keep an obsolete ecosystem going. Mooallem calls this “gardening the wilderness. The line between conservation and domestication has blurred.”

Mooallem isn’t the first to announce the end of “wilderness.” In “The End of Nature” (1989), Bill McKibben argued that nature is no longer independent of humans, since no part of the planet remains unaffected by what we do. And in 1995, William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble With Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” defined “wilderness” as a cultural construct and called into question efforts to keep pockets of America “pristine.” Mooallem picks up where these authors left off, but as he visits the habitats of endangered species and explores our complicated and sometimes confounding relationship with wild animals, he finds himself captivated by the imperfect people who dedicate their lives to saving them. This is not a book about wilderness; it’s a book about us. “Zoom out and what you see is one species . . . struggling to keep all others in their appropriate places, or at least in the places we’ve decided they ought to stay,” he writes. “We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic.”

The book explores these issues while providing nuanced portraits of people who grapple with the idea of “wilderness” every day. One of the most memorable is Brooke Pennypacker, a sometimes annoyingly talkative pilot for the whooping crane migration, who wishes he could have been a better father. Discouraged by big egos and political infighting (in Mooallem’s telling, “the way people’s good intentions can so easily curdle when combined”), Pennypacker remains fully committed to the cause: “The birds are an excuse for doing something good,” he says. Mooallem paints conservationists like Pennypacker and, by extension, all of us, as members of a possibly doomed but noble species. “This is all there is, and all there ever could be,” he writes, “achingly imperfect people, working to achieve something more moral than they are.” As one backyard lepidopterist tells him, “I just want to be part of a generation that tries.”

WILD ONES

A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

By Jon Mooallem

339 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

Meehan Crist, a writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University, is working on a book about traumatic brain injury.